Research Impact

Maximizing the impacts of your research

In this competitive environment, it is important to demonstrate the research impact our faculty have or are engaged in. This page is intended to help individual researchers and research units at the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Toronto, to promote their research and to use their impact evidence in successfully competing for research funding or getting promotion.

1. Establishing your researcher identity

The accuracy of research output and impact analysis are dependent on a number of factors. For example, the accuracy of author indexing in the research analytic product, and linking individuals to their actual publications plays a crucial role in this process. This can be especially difficult for those authors who have common first and last names, or who have changed their names throughout their career. Creating an Author ID makes it much easier to distinguish between researchers with the same or similar names and ensures all citations created by one individual are accounted for.

Scopus automatically assigns an Author ID to each author indexed in its databases. However, it is the researchers' responsibility to ensure that all of their outputs recorded in Scopus have been merged under a single Scopus Author ID. It is important to note that the Author Profile in Scopus contains articles indexed in this database only, and not all articles published by one author may be indexed in Scopus. The Scopus Author ID does not provide a full picture of the publishing history of the author, if the articles are indexed elsewhere.

Researchers need to create a ResearcherID and then populate it by searching for their publications within Web of Science and adding them to the RearcherID. You can also add articles not indexed in Web of Science to your publication list within the ResearcherID profile.

It is highly recommend that researchers create an ORCID Author Identifier (a 16-digit identifier). This identifier is required by many funding agencies: After registering for an ORCID ID researchers can populate their ORCID profile by searching and linking to publications, grants indexed in external databases. Researchers can push their professional information to other systems or give permission to trusted organizations to read from their profile. In this way, researchers do not need to repeatedly enter the same professional information into multiple systems. For instance, by linking ORCID and NCBI accounts, researchers can transfer information from their ORCID record to the SciENcv (Science Experts Network Curriculum Vitae) system to create National Institute of Health (NIH) or NSF biosketches.

2. Tracking your research impact

Once researchers have a unique ID, it is easy to use metrics to evaluate research impact. Please note that since no single database indexes every type of publication, and no single citation-tracking database has the same coverage, metrics cannot provide a comprehensive indication of a given researcher’s, or institutions' research output. It should be used to complement, not replace, other research assessment measures, such as peer-review. In order to use these metric measures appropriately, it is important to start by identifying the questions the results will help to answer and then collecting data accordingly. Some of the example questions and possible metrics can be used to answer them:

Possible metrics for Research Impact

About Benchmarking

Questions from individual/institutions

What is your research performance?

How can you demonstrate the influence of your research?

How do you compare to others in the same discipline at other institutions nationally and globally?

How many articles did you publish in this particular journal last year compared with your competitor?

Weighted quantitative measure

Field baselines: average citations per paper for papers in a field defined for a specific time period

Expected citation rate: how often a paper is expected to be cited based on its year of publication, journal, and article type or subject category

Percentile: indicate how a paper has performed relative to others in its field.

Average citations per publication

About collaboration

Questions from individual/institutions

Who are you collaborating with?

How collaborative are you?

What are the output and citation impact of our co-authored publications?

How to assess output and impact of publications with certain collaboration partners relative to performance of the entire institution

How can you Identify potential collaborators?

Which Countries, Institutions and Authors are the most active?

Quantitative measure

Number of collaborating Institutions

Number of co-authored publications

Number of citations

Number of Citing Countries

National /International Collaboration (geographical)

Academic-Corporate Collaboration

Weighted quantitative measure

Field-Weighted Citation Impact

Average citations per publication/li>

About research trends

Questions from individual/institutions

What are the emerging and declining topics in your Research Area?

Quantitative measure

Citation reports by topic

About funding agency

Questions from individual/institutions

How to identify funding agencies who will support your research? How to identify the most prolific authors/institutions with a specific funding agency? (Potential collaborator?) How to analyze the impact of research funded by a specific funding agency? How to compare the research output/impact of research funded by different funding agency?

Quantitative measure

Web of Science Documents

Times Cited

Weighted quantitative measure

% Docs Cited

Category Normalized Citation Impact

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2.1 Tools for calculating bibliometrics at the individual level

The following are some common tools which are available to help researchers calculate bibliometrics for their scholarly work. You can also set up alerts in these tools so that when someone cites one of your articles you will receive an email.

Researchers are increasingly sharing their citations with their colleagues on social media platforms. A new method of measurement for type of sharing is required to capture its impact . Altmetrics, or alternative metrics, try to capture the impact of scholarly articles shared via social media channels. Examples of Altmetrics include:

2.2 Tools for benchmarking research performance at the individual, departmental and institutional levels

There are two major bibliometric tools for benchmarking researcher performance based on citations for publications indexed in databases. SciVal provides metrics for publications indexed in Scopus, and InCites for publications indexed in Web of Science.

For both of these tools, the entity can be:

a single research, publication or institution

a group of researchers, a set of publications, or a group of institutions

3.1 Create a publishing strategy, choose the right journal:

SHERPA/ROMEO can be used for checking publisher copyright policies regarding open access and self-archiving. For a brief summary of the copyright policies and self-archiving rights of the most popular dental journals visit our “Open Access” page.